Mall security draws less praise than the police

CARPENTER

June 13, 2006|By Paul Carpenter Of The Morning Call

The police in Columbus, Ohio, are a little slow. When Steve Ferry reported a burglary at his home there, it took them 31/2 hours to show up. On another occasion, he reported an intruder trying to break in, and the police never came.

In May, he moved to Whitehall Township. On June 2, he inadvertently left his wallet on a magazine stand at the Weis Market in the Whitehall Mall, and it was stolen. He reported the theft by cell phone and asked the township cops to meet him at his home. It took them six minutes to show up.

That is no exaggeration, and Ferry was so impressed he wrote a letter praising the Whitehall police. "Sometimes the police get a bad rap, and I wanted somebody to know the other side," he told me when I talked to him on Monday.

Police promptness, however, was not the most fascinating part of his story. The most fascinating part concerned the man jailed on charges of swiping the wallet and trying to use two credit cards in it.

According to a police complaint, Ferry left his wallet at the magazine stand at 4:21 p.m. and returned to the store by 5:15 p.m. after he realized what he had done, but it was gone.

An employee of IPC International, the security company for Lehigh Valley Mall and the adjacent Whitehall Mall, the police report said, "recovered the wallet and stated that he found [it] on 6/2/06, between [5:45 and 6:30 p.m.] ... in the same place that Ferry left it."

That did not quite mesh with Ferry's statement that the wallet was gone by 5:15 p.m., and it especially did not mesh with the timing of two attempts to use a credit card -- at 4:28 and 4:32 p.m. (Ferry said the attempts involved purchases of nearly $20,000.)

As reported in a one-paragraph item in Saturday's Morning Call, Luis A. Rivera, 27, of Allentown, was arraigned and put in Lehigh County Prison on charges of "access device fraud, identity theft and theft" involving Ferry's wallet.

The story did not mention it, but Rivera is the same IPC security company employee, police told me Monday, who had reported finding the wallet after 5:45 p.m. on June 2.

So we had a mall security guard, whose job is to protect customers from thieves, in the clink for theft. But that, dear hearts, is not the half of it.

The Whitehall police had a little help from Ferry himself.

He told me that when he learned of attempts to make purchases of Dell products on his credit cards, he called Dell to get a shipping address and a telephone number in Allentown. A reverse phone search provided another address.

"I parked a block from the address," he said, and people emerged. "I took their pictures with my telephoto lens."

The next day, Ferry took his family to the Red Lobster restaurant, right across the street from the Whitehall Mall, and saw a passing security vehicle. He flagged it down to ask about his wallet. Ferry said the driver told him he was the guard who found the wallet. He thanked the man, but there was something odd.

He went home and checked the pictures he had taken in Allentown. One of those in the pictures, he said, looked just like the man he had met in the IPC mall security vehicle.

All that, combined with the speedy efficacy of the Whitehall Police Department, resulted in the arrest of Rivera.

Police Lt. Greg Gruber confirmed that Rivera is employed by IPC. I asked him if Rivera had a criminal record prior to the wallet episode.

"Yes," Gruber said, but did not provide details. I checked Lehigh County's criminal records, but found nothing.

I also contacted IPC, but no one returned my calls.

Ferry, when he was not heaping praise on Whitehall cops, was less warmly disposed toward the IPC outfit.

"It makes me wonder what kind of security checks they do on their people," he said.